Neoliberal Postcolonialism in the Media – Constructing Filipino Nurse Subjects in Finland

In 2007, a private recruitment agency started recruiting nurses from the Philippines to private elderly care homes and to operation wards in Finland. Although less than a hundred nurses have been recruited to Finland, the recruitment has received extensive media attention. Applying discourse analysis to the media data, the article analyzes the ways in which Filipino subjects were constructed by the Finnish media. We distinguish three types of categories relating to Filipino nurses as ‘good migrant/suspect worker’, ‘global commodity’ and as a ‘colonized subject’. The article argues that the discourse depicting Filipino subjects is a form of neoliberal postcolonialism, which combines a global geography of colonial power with a discourse of individualized economic risks and responsibilities.